Entries in Joel Edgerton
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Another Oscar hopeful trailer coming at you. Focus Features will begin the platform release of Boy Erased this November 2nd which is of course a prime Oscar date. December is sometimes too late but November is a sweet spot, rarely too early nor too late exactly if the film is high profile enough with Oscar pedigree. Not that November is easy. There will be a ton of competition for media attention.

We now have the poster with Lucas Hedges praying for a second Oscar nomination to release him of this gay burden? And the trailer has arrived too. The buzz is already strong for the acting which is no surprise with the trio of Lucas Hedges, Nicole Kidman, and Russell Crowe jerking the tears... but can the film itself also impress? The trailer and a Yes No Maybe So breakdown are after the jump...

Given the samey-sameness of summer movie season when 75% of everything is BIG FRANCHISE, little morsels about fall movie season taste especially delicious. The gay conversion camp drama Boy Erased starring Lucas Hedges released images that we forgot to share last week and now Steve McQueen's crime drama Widows with Viola Davis as the widow of a gangster (we assume Liam Neeson given the photo) has released a few of its own. They're all after the jump...

The Russian Tourism Board won’t likely be sponsoring the film Red Sparrow, the new spy movie from Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence. Other than featuring some very chic ushankas on a very attractive cast, this film makes Russians look very nasty, just like we’ve always imagined them to be for the movies. Lawrence’s conception of the country illustrates his wonderfully corny, often thrilling, mysterious, and silly/serious approach into old-fashioned espionage that we don’t see much of nowadays.

Lawrence starts his film where he should: firmly on the face of his leading lady, Jennifer Lawrence, sporting a bangs-heavy brown wig. She’s a famous ballet dancer in Moscow, and the director steals a bit of the feverish tone of Black Swan in her early scenes. The plot unravels in a series of crosses, double-crosses, and reverses that include her involvement with a US spy played by Joel Edgerton...

Will Smith misses the good ole days. He has been trying to reclaim his blockbuster status since 2008’s Hancock. In between, Smith has been featured in a string of weird melodramatic dramas (Seven Pounds, Collateral Beauty), traditional action genre vehicles (Men in Black 3, After Earth, Suicide Squad) and films that sink or swim on the charisma of the stars (Focus, Concussion). None of these have worked.

Reuniting with Suicide Squad director David Ayer, Smith tries to make it work again in action/sci-fi with Netflix’s Bright. This also doesn’t really work...

Jason from MNPP here, wishing a happy 44th birthday to the perennially underrated James Marsden today! He's not so underrated that he's ever really gone without work at least (and he's currently riding the zeigeist a bit with the success of Westworld, although I don't know if his moon-eyed compoke Teddy is really what's keeping anybody coming back to that show week after week) but underrated he still somehow seems. That's an impressive impression to give for someone as breathtakingly gorgeous as him! No small feat.

I suppose it's the "Nice Guy Loser" role he's been called on to play time and again - we've watched him watch The Girl go off with the right Mr. Right so many times we've built a stockpile of empathy for him. Speaking of, for today's for "Beauty vs Beast" let's hit up just one of those roles, the 2007 hit film Enchanted (which insanely is turning 10 in November, can you believe it)...

PREVIOUSLY Last week's It Comes at Night contest between Joel Edgerton & Christopher Abbott's survivalist characters was a tight race for a bit but the latter pulled out in front eventually taking 62% of your vote - said Nick T:

"Their scenes together were my favorite parts of the film, their beards my favorite characters."

Jason from MNPP here with this week's "Beauty vs Beast" -- I usually try to choose older movies for this series because it's more likely y'all have seen them and have an opinion. That is unless we're talking about great big cultural juggernauts - those are usually safe. It Comes at Night isn't an old movie, and it wasn't so much a cultural juggernaut either, but here we are anyway. The film had a stellar ad campaign (thanks to A24, the king of stellar ad campaigns these days) so it did get some chatter at the time of its release, but it ultimately only made just under 20 million bucks. This is no Avatar.

And yet here on the eve of its release on blu-ray tomorrow I still want to highlight the movie, and I have faith that a good portion of the TFE audience, who already knew Trey Edward Shults' amazing Krisha, was the audience that sought the movie out. For good (I loved it) or for ill (I know a lot of people felt cheated by the ad campaign which baited and switched a supernatural horror film for a tense chamber piece). And you'll maybe have an opinion on who was in the right - Joel Edgerton's homeowner Paul or Christopher Abbott's encroacher Will.

PREVIOUSLY For no reason in particular we hit up Halle Berry's Catwomanfor last week's contest but it was her nemesis, the skin-care supervillain played by Sharon Stone, who slinked away with the 65% win - said Eder Arcas:

"... the WINNER here gotta be SHARON STONE, the woman delivers camp like no one else , she`s elegant and graceful cool, because, well, she's Sharon Stone. You always get the feeling she's just about ready to snap a full on crazy - but that kinda IS what is interesting about Sharon Stone. Sort of a female Jack Nicholson, but hotter in heels and a skirt."